Content marketing can be a very effective strategy for boosting your bottom line. Depending on your goal, it can be a great means of marketing. However, in order to produce the best possible results, you need to do it right. Here are ten tips that can help you up your content marketing game in 2021.

Define Your Goals

First things first – you need to be absolutely clear about the current campaign’s goal so that you don’t end up wasting your efforts. If poorly defined, you’ll have a hard time making progress in your marketing efforts. That’s true for any marketing strategy, but it’s especially relevant when it comes to content marketing. You should set a clearly defined goal for your marketing campaign – and make sure it’s an achievable one.

Know Your Target Audiences

One thing you absolutely must get right from the onset of your content marketing campaign is nailing down on your target audience. The scattershot approach to marketing, where you try to market to as large a crowd as possible, is just not applicable to content marketing in 2021. Identifying a core of users that you wish to cater to is the key to making content marketing work for you.

Now, this does not mean that you should necessarily laser-focus on one audience and ignore everyone else. In fact, you could target a variety of audiences with your marketing campaign. What it does mean is that you should clearly distinguish all the different groups that you will market to and make separate pushes to influence them.

Do Persona Research

Once you have managed to identify your target audiences, you need to do some serious due diligence on their qualities, habits, preferences, tendencies, disposition, and demeanor. All these combined shape your “buyer persona” , a type you should become intimately familiar with.

Notably, active research of the buyer persona of your target audience should not be a priority just for people who are new to marketing. Veteran marketing experts also benefit from dedicating time to keeping an ear close to the ground and contemplating their findings because aspects of it change all the time.

The buyer persona changes as a matter of course, with the march of technology, social, economic, and even political progress all playing a role in the process. Keeping an eye on it is the prudent thing to do. 

Focus on Content Value

Ultimately, the purpose of your product or service is to resolve an issue that your target audience has. Your main goal should be to inform about a problem, help people spot it, and suggest a solution. Make sure you cover all three bases in each individual piece of content you produce. 

Listing all the aspects of a problem in great detail helps establish you as an expert on the subject and builds trust and authority.

People yet to experience the issue in question and those that are in the middle of it are two viable target audiences for your marketing efforts. Make sure you include content that provides good value for them with your product pitch.

Concentrate on What Makes Your Product Unique

No two companies are alike, and the same goes for the products they provide. You need to be certain your audience gets to know why your particular product is the right pick for them. 

Remember – you don’t necessarily need to pitch your product as the best thing since sliced bread. That type of proclamation often sounds hollow and disingenuous and can actually turn people away from your content.

Use content to emphasize the differences and why said differences make your product appealing to your targeted audience.

Polish Your Call-to-action

You need to focus your efforts on making your call to action as smooth and impactful as possible to ensure maximum effect. 

There are many ways to actually make your CTA work well, but the underlying principle driving them all is very simple – it must be well placed and must appear natural.

Sticking your CTA everywhere is a horrible practice and you should avoid it. No one likes, or trusts, an obvious “shill” that’s trying to be inconspicuous and failing. So when you include you CTA, make sure it ties into your broader point, that it’s well-positioned and doesn’t look out of place.

Consider Your Content Formats

Analyze the goal you set for your content marketing campaign in relation to all the buyer persona information that you’ve gathered. Then seriously consider what content formats are popular right now and which one would be the best one for influencing your audience.

Some audiences are likely to respond well to short animated video presentations. There are groups who would probably ignore said type of content altogether, in favor of browsing Instagram posts. And last but not least, there are people who would be more receptive to long-form content, such as lectures, audiobooks, etc.

Podcasts have also become hugely popular lately. Although they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, the format offers possibilities for content marketing. Content pieces have always been in fashion and can provide great value to your target audience – but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of content. 

Get to know what format your audience is likely to appreciate, and focus on producing that to the best of your ability. Naturally, you can mix things up a bit now and again and try to branch out – but make sure your experiments don’t detract from the main focus of your efforts.

Diversify the Platforms for Publishing Content

Be on all of the platforms. Make your content interactive an easy to find, whatever your visitors preferred method of communication and browsing the Internet may be. 

Make sure you’re on all the social media networks, even the ones that aren’t the most popular. Consider your options and find a good spot for your blogging efforts. Use multiple platforms to publish and promote your videos if you’re into producing that type of content. 

Diversify Content

Don’t be afraid to build on what you already have. Try out new forms of content and iterate on concepts that have potential. Increasing the variety of content in your marketing campaign is generally a good idea. As long as you don’t divert from your campaign’s main focus, it could produce good results.

Manage Your Organization Well

Use a system that allows you to manage content creation and publication. It can be as simple as a well-structured spreadsheet in Google Drive. There are also specialised software tools to help you manage business processes professionally. It must be clear who the content creator is and when each piece is going live. 

Other features, such as time-tracking, progress tracking, real-time task reporting, etc. can also prove to be useful.